


River, Answer

by amberspyglass



Category: Suzanne - Leonard Cohen (Song)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-13
Updated: 2013-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-04 12:11:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1080864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberspyglass/pseuds/amberspyglass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Philadelphia, Mississippi seems to promise rivers twice in its name, but it's landlocked twice over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	River, Answer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [evelyn_b](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evelyn_b/gifts).



She texted me from the living room, which happened to be the same room I was in.  I had recently taken up needlepoint, and I’d written out a list of inspiring words I wanted to embroider onto samplers.   That day I’d settled on WISDOM, but the very first letter defeated me and the back of the canvas was starting to accumulate tangled fistfuls of scarlet thread.  My phone chimed softly.

_i am feeling a little Unsteady_

Startled, I looked up at her.  She was sitting on the fat, wine-velvet couch, wearing a complicated nightgown covered with dowdy lace panels that I secretly wanted to know how to make.  Her feet were tucked beneath her in the unselfconscious pose of a woman who is completely alone.  She was still typing. 

_lets find a river to carry us and a Shore To steady us_

We were in Philadelphia.  Philadelphia, _Mississippi_ , that is, which seems to promise rivers twice in its name but which is landlocked twice over.  It was early evening, mid-October but sweltering for all that.  The left side of Suzanne’s face glowed bluish thanks to the rippling light from the aquarium.  Her phone’s screen added a warmer shine to her chin, like the buttercups from the children’s game.  I set the canvas down on my lap as my phone chimed again. 

_we could make a picnic of it please_

Suzanne stopped typing but she didn’t look up.  She just watched her phone, awaiting my response. 

I typed and deleted a half-dozen stupid sentences:  _Do you want to talk?  Are you okay?_ Of course she didn’t.  Of course she wasn’t.  She’d said as much.  And anyway, all I wanted was for her to be happy, and a trip to the river seemed to be an easy recipe for happiness.  Why try to turn this into a conversation about something else?

So I typed:  _Road trip?_

Still she didn’t look at me, but when her phone buzzed, her face broke into a glorious smile.

***

Our distance from the Mississippi was a constant source of frustration for Suzanne, but we couldn’t afford to move.  A far-off uncle of hers owned the Philadelphia house, and he let us stay in the mother-in-law suite for a pittance.  He rented the main building to an old deaf couple who didn’t own a computer and sometimes asked us, by way of meticulously handwritten notes, if we could please order Chinese takeout for them.

I was on the cleaning staff at the casino and made barely enough in wages to pay for the gas I needed to get there and back.  Suzanne did something shady on the Internet which made her PayPal account balance spike from time to time.  She wasn’t secretive about it, but none of her explanations made any sense to me, and once I was sure that she wasn’t giving anyone her real name or our home address I stopped asking about it.  What paychecks came all went into the aquarium, which I now understand was the way she brought a river—a still, rectangular river, a transparent block lifted out of the moving waters—into our living space.  Some days she would sit on that couch for hours, laptop slanting forgotten across her knees, watching the tiger barbs move in their perfectly timed pulses, the bleeding-heart tetras and zebra danios providing silent percussion, the lone redtail shark authoritatively threading its way through the rhythms made by its companions, all uncannily bright against the backdrop of swaying moss.

She slipped into the bedroom immediately after our texted conversation was over, leaving me alone with the fish and my disaster of a canvas.  I wondered if she was finished for the night;   it wouldn’t be the first time she’d gone to bed before eight.  But she re-emerged only a few minutes later, wearing a summer dress that she’d picked up at the Sally Ann for a dollar and a quarter the previous weekend.  The dress had seen better days, but I could see why she liked it:  its pale yellow was very pretty against her rich brown skin, and it was printed with dozens of tiny pictures of robins, a few of which were eagerly pulling at worms.

“You look nice.”

“So do you.”

I looked down at myself.  I was wearing the same thing I always wore when I wasn’t working, namely a white tank top and cargo shorts, and I had never once thought of it as “nice”.  Suzanne continued to watch me expectantly from the doorway, dancing lightly from foot to foot like a nervous horse.

It took me a while to understand.  “You want to go _now?_ ”

“I’m sad now.  I might not be sad any more tomorrow.”

I couldn’t tell whether she meant that going now would take away her sadness, making tomorrow seem brighter from here... or whether she didn’t want to waste the chance to indulge in a perfectly good sadness by waiting until the sadness went away.  In either case, there was no way to argue, and no reason to try.

***

I stayed in the car while she ran into Vowell’s, a ten-dollar bill balled up in her fist.  The car, too, was a gift from her uncle, if by “gift” you mean “something he had forgotten at the house around 1992 with the keys wedged in the cushions of the front seat.”  I sometimes considered replacing it, the car I mean, but even if I managed to commandeer one of Suzanne’s Internet paychecks I’m not sure I would have had enough to buy something that ran as well as this lumpy brown Buick.

There was nothing on the radio.  I lit a cigarette, and then another, and then a third, watching the stars blink in one by one.  Suzanne always lingered when she shopped.  Even when she was buying only a pound of coffee or a pint of milk, she would sometimes spend an hour or two wandering up and down the aisles, studying items she found interesting.  I could see her testing the heft of bags of flour and dried beans – she loved dense, heavy packaging, and didn’t much worry herself about the contents.  Often she would tell me later about all the things she noticed about the art on the labels, imagined stories for all the characters in the logos.  The staff was always happy to see her, never once shooed her out of the store, even when she sat cross-legged on the floor, mesmerized by a display of pickle jars or cat litter.

At last she emerged.   I was out of cigarettes and doubted there would be enough change from the ten to buy another pack.  She stood for a moment in the automatic doorway, triumphantly holding aloft a bag of oranges in one hand and a half-gallon plastic bottle of off-brand sweet tea in the other.  I sent her a thumbs-up sign and started the car.

As she slid into the passenger’s seat she announced, “Let’s start going to church again.”

“Excuse me?”  The church, unlike the grocery store, didn’t treat us with much kindness.

Suzanne shrugged as she fussed with her seatbelt.

“Did someone in there... did someone say something to you?”

“What?  No.  Why would they?  I just saw a cross around the cashier’s neck and I got to thinking it might be nice.”

I considered this as I backed sloppily out of our parking spot.  “I didn’t know you missed it.”

“I always miss everything that’s gone.”

We didn’t have anything sharp enough to cut the mesh bag open, so Suzanne spent the next few minutes trying to bend the thick aluminum staple with her house key as I made my way to the westbound 16.  Eventually the staple gave, and she plucked an orange out of the bag with a happy sigh.  Using the same key, she scored the peel, filling the car with delicious-smelling mist.  And then she began passing perfect segments over to me, one  at a time as I drove, and each one tasted better than the last.

***

It was completely dark by the time we reached the shore that would steady us.  My night vision had always been weak, so I nervously reached for Suzanne’s hand as we picked our way barefoot across the grass.  She walked slowly — as a courtesy to me, I reckon — but her muscles had the tension of a zoo-bound animal ready to make a break for it.  All I could see was the blurred outline of her yellow dress, but that was enough to show me how much her body language had changed:  no longer was she the hunched nightgown-clad woman who’d been texting me on the red couch only a few hours ago.  I could feel the Mississippi breathing beneath us, Louisiana watching matronly from the opposite shore, the land sloping gently downward under the skin of my soles.

“Careful,” she said, just as my foot missed dry land and plunked into the river.  I pitched forward, straining briefly against Suzanne’s strength.  Some feathery underwater plant tickled my ankles, and I thought of the fluorescent-lit fanwort puffing in the fishtank back at home, wondered if this was the same creature, wondered if they were all connected, if they shared a mind, if they could talk to each other, if they were talking to each other right now.  “Hello,” I whispered to the seaweed.  “Tell the tetras we made it.”

A splash signalled that Suzanne had joined me in the water as I straightened into a stand.  I felt the sog of her dress slapping against my calf.  “We made it,” she echoed. 

“Do you feel better?”

“Steady, steady,” she said, and I couldn’t tell whether it was an answer or a command.  “Let’s sleep out here.  It’s a nice night.”

“Suzanne, I don’t—”

But she was already pulling me downriver, no doubt searching for some kind of clearing in the rapidly-thickening woods.  We were probably no more than a mile from the highway but the place felt wild and black.  I sank happily into it, letting the reverse shadow of the yellow dress lead me.  I didn’t know what the night would bring, but I knew Suzanne would be with me when the sun came up.


End file.
